Wednesday, March 13, 2013

While burn-in testing my new USB 3.0 ZFS RAID array on Ubuntu 12.04.1 I wanted to fill disks with random data. Not zeroes from /dev/zero, but random data to catch any flakey disks or USB cables. Well it quickly turned out that reading from urandom was slowing process down a lot. Since quality of randomness doesn't matter much in this case frandom was easy solution.